America's economic future is increasingly uncertain.In my view,
unpredictable economic policy—massive fiscal "stimulus" and ballooning debt, the
Federal Reserve's quantitative easing with multiyear near-zero interestrates,
and regulatory uncertaintydue to ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank financial
reforms—is the main cause of persistent high unemployment and our feeble
recovery from the recession.

A reform strategy built on more predictable, rules-based fiscal, monetary and
regulatory policies will help restore economic prosperity.That will be a
daunting task, of course, but as they undertake the necessary changes, reformers
should pay close attention to what the great economist and philosopher Friedrich
A. Hayek wrote in the middle years of the last century.

Hayek argued that the case for rules-based policy goes beyond economics and
should appeal to all those concerned about assaults on freedom.He wrote in his
classic 1944 book, "The Road to Serfdom," that "nothing distinguishes more
clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary
government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as
the Rule of Law."

Hayek added, "Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in
all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand—rules which
make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its
coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one's individual affairs on
the basis of this knowledge."

Rules-based policies make the economy work better by providing a predictable
policy framework within which consumers and businesses make decisions.But they
also protect freedom, a concept Hayek developed in his 1960 book, "The
Constitution of Liberty."

.Hayek traces the relationship of the rule of law to freedom back to
Aristotle, and then to Cicero, about whom he wrote, "No other author shows more
clearly . . . that freedom is dependent upon certain attributes of the law, its
generality and certainty, and the restrictions it places on the discretion of
authority." Hayek also quotes from the Second Treatise of Civil Government by
John Locke, the father of classical liberalism who had a profound influence on
America's Founding Fathers: "The end [meaning the purpose] of law is not to
abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom . . . where there is no
law, there is no freedom."

Hayek understood that a rules-based system has a dual purpose—freedom and
prosperity.Thus the needed reforms in America today—and in any society
overburdened by government intervention—are supported by twoconstituencies:
those focused on freedom and those focused on prosperity.

But skeptics ask how a system of policy rules can work when politicians and
government officials want to "do something" to help the economy or feel public
pressure to do so. A rules-basedsystem with less discretion sounds good in
theory, they say, but rules mean you do nothing, and that is impossible in
today's charged political climate and 24-hournews cycle.

Hayek had an answer to this. In "The Road to Serfdom" he wrote that it was
wrong to say that the "characteristic attitude [of a rules-based system] is
inaction of the state" and presented a counter example to this common view,
saying that "the state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud or
deception in any other way) is certainly acting."

Consider other examples. Rules for monetary policy do not mean that the
central bank does not change the instruments of policy (interest rates or the
money supply) in response to events, or provide loans in the case of a bank run.
Rather they mean that they take such actions in a predictable manner.

But in the years immediately preceding the 2008 financial crisis, monetary
policy deviated from the more predictable rules-based policy that worked in the
1980s and '90s—i.e., the Federal Reserve held rates too low for too long.
Moreover, government regulators did not enforce existing rules on risk-taking at
banks and other financial institutions, including Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

.Then came the discretionary stimulus packages and exploding debt, the
regulatory unpredictability associated with ObamaCare and Dodd-Frank, which
includes hundreds of rules still waiting to be written, and the unprecedented
quantitative easing through which the Federal Reservebought77% of new federal
debt in 2011.

The U.S. tax code has become particularly unpredictable.The number of
provisions expiring has skyrocketed to 133 in 2010-12 from 11 in 2000-02. And
now the epitome of unpredictable policy is upon us in the form of a
self-inflicted "fiscal cliff" where virtually the entire tax code will be up for
grabs by the end of this year.

It is deviation from a rule or a strategy that creates uncertainty and
hinders prosperity.Thus, regulators who decide not to actwhen financial
institutions take on risk beyond the limits of the rules and regulations are not
being faithful to the law and indeed to the rule of law.

What can citizens do to achieve a more rules-based system? Here Hayek issued
a warning. In a chapter in "The Road to Serfdom" called "Why the Worst Get on
Top," he argued that there is a biasagainst individuals in government who
firmly believe in rules-based policy. People who have the ambition to get to the
topfrequently have a bias toward discretionary interventionism, whether
motivated by the desire to capture regulatory agencies on behalf of clients,
advance the interests of cronies or indeed simply to position themselves for
further career advancement later on.

Those who benefit directly from interventions will work hard to make sure
that officials who favordiscretionary activism advance. Firms in the financial
industry, for example, that benefit from a bailout mentality will favorofficials who are comfortable with bailouts. Perhaps the answer is to find
people who are "overcommitted" to rules-based policy. Then, after all the
inevitable pressures and perverse incentives, they may emerge with a sensible
balance.

Some will claim, of course, that crises force policy makers to deviate from
predictable rules.One can argue that bailouts and other discretionary
interventions were needed during the panic of the fall of 2008, and perhaps they
prevented a more serious panic. But that is like saying that the person who set
fire to your house should be exonerated because he helped put out the fire and
saved a few rooms.

Mr. Taylor is professor of economics at Stanford and a senior fellow at
the Hoover Institution. His book, "First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring
America's Prosperity" (Norton 2012), was awarded the 2012 Hayek prize by the
Manhattan Institute. This op-ed is adapted from his Hayek Prize Lecture
delivered on May 31.

The Yellow River, regarded as the cradle of Chinese civilization, winds its way more than 5,000 kilometers from the Tibetan Plateau to its mouth in the Bohai Sea. SPIEGEL travelled the course of the river and discovered how quickly the country is pushing forward with its rise to superpower status -- and how ruthlessly.

Qinghai is the end of the world.The remote province between the Tibetan Plateau and the deserts in the north was long considered China's Siberia, where the rulers in Beijing sent their prisoners, both criminal and political..The region is so remote that many labor camps have since been dismantled and moved to more accessible regions.In China's special form of socialism, even prison camps are expected to make a profit -- a tall order in forbidding Qinghai Province.

.Qinghai, meaning "green sea," is named after the large salt lake in the eastern part of the province.But the term could also be used to describe the endless grasslands on which Tibetan nomads graze their herds of yak and sheep. Nowadays, most of the shepherds have traded in their saddles for moped seats.

.From the provincial capital Xining, the road climbs steeply up to the roof of the world.Tibetan prayer flags flutter in the wind along the mountain passes, some more than 5,000 meters (16,400feet) high..The Huang He, or Yellow River, China's "Mother River," has its source in this landscape of myths and mythical creatures, not far from the border with the Tibet Autonomous Region.The river is seen as a symbol of the entire nation, with its inwardly directed culture and a history stretchingbackthousands of years. "Whoever controls the Yellow River controlsChina" is a timeless maximattributed to Yu the Great, the first emperor of the Xia Dynasty.He is believed to have lived around 2,200 B.C. -- if he existed at all..The Yellow River is to the Chinese what the Nile is to Egyptians, the Mississippi to Americans and the Rhine to Germans.Deeply symbolic monuments, statues of mothers holding babies in their arms, stand along its banks. The ancestors of the present-day Chinese are said to have carved the first characters into turtle shells near its muddy shore. The legendary Yellow Emperor livednear the Huang He, which was viewed with such reverence that a beautiful girl was sacrificed to the river once a year.

.The river winds 5,464 kilometers (3,394 miles) through the vast country. The philosopherConfucius, whose concept of an all-encompassing "harmony" has since been turned into a state policy by Beijing's communists, was born near its banks. In 1935, during their war with the then-ruling Kuomintang government, Mao Zedong and his comrades retreated to the river, in the pale-yellow loesslandscape of northern China. The liberation of Mao's forces, which had been surrounded by Chinese Nationalist soldiers, has assumed its place in the central heroic mythology of the Communist Party as the "Long March."China's generals have sometimes even used the river as a weapon.In 1938, General Chiang Kai-shekblew up the dams near the city of Zhengzhou to stop the advance of Japanese troops, causing the deaths by drowning ofhundreds of thousands -- friend and foe alike.

.A Land of Reinvention

.

Today, the Yellow River is the most important source of water for 140 millionpeople and thousands of factories. Along its course are vast deposits of mineral resources -- coal, oil, natural gas and rare earths -- which are becoming increasingly important for China's economic boom. .A trip along the Yellow River reveals the enormous costs of China's ascent to the ranks of the most powerful nations on Earth, how ruthlessly its rulers have treated their own people and how recklessly they have been in their over-exploitation of nature. But it also shows the enormous amount of energy with which this country -- like the river -- is flowing forward. A trip along the YellowRiver also makes it clear that China has confidently resumed its ancestral position after a century of humiliation at the hands of hostile powers..The trip to the headwaters of the Yellow River passes through Madoi, a small market town on the TibetanPlateau4,300 metersabove sea level, where the houses are freshly whitewashed and a new police headquarters building is under construction.The Tibetan nomads from the surrounding region come to Madoi to buy grain, medicine and other essential items. .Migrant workers from other parts of China have also made their way to the region, where the thin airmakes breathing difficult and too much physical exertion causes headaches. They include people like Li Bing, 23, from Anhuiprovincein eastern China. For the lastfive years, he has sewn and sold temple decorations and prayer flags in his tiny shop. There is a simple reason, he says, for the fact that he, a Chinese non-believer, sells Tibetan devotional objects: "The Tibetans don't quiteget the professional side of it, with the ordering and logistics," he says..Li has now brought his wife to Madoi and invested the equivalent of about €20,000 ($25,000) in the business. The couple lives in an alcove above the shop, where Li also keeps the sewing machine he uses to make prayer flags. "Life is cheap here," they say. "We won't return to Anhui until we've saved a million yuan." That would be about€120,000, or enough to make Li and Yu wealthy people in China. It's quite possible that they will achieve their goal.

An Eternal but Changing Landscape

Many rivulets stream down from the Bayan Har Mountains in the northeastern corner of the Tibetan Plateau, flow together and then pass through twomountain lakes, Gyaring Lake and Ngoring Lake.On a hill above the lakes, the Communist Party has erected a monument to the river that looks like the stylized horns of a yak. The inscription on a copper plaquedescribes the importance of the river for China's identity: "The Yellow River is the cradle of the Chinese people. The Yellow Riverregion is the birthplace of the magnificent, ancient Chinese culture. The spirit of the Yellow River is the spirit of the Chinese people."But even here, in this remote place high in the mountains, the world is no longer what it used to be. "It used to be much colder than it is today," says a national park ranger guarding the road leading to the twolakes."Sometimes the snow was so high that I couldn't open my door in the morning," he says."Today, it only reaches my ankles."The unpaved road to the banks of the lakes is currently being repaired because melting permafrost has caused the road's surface to sink..But the belching smokestacks and car exhaust fumes4,000 metersbelow, in the country's interior, are not the only thing to blame for these environmental changes.The Tibetan herdsmen also play a role in the destruction of their region. Owing to strong demand for costly cashmere wool, in recent years, the nomads have been driving bigger and bigger herds across the grasslands. The cashmere goats are particularly aggressive grazers, tearing outstalks of grass with their roots, which causes the ground to become more sandy..Now fences block access to the nomads' traditional grazing grounds.The government is resettling the herdsmen in other areas, which is creating bad blood with the Tibetans..The Gesawang Monastery, at the entrance to Madoi, consists of a few stone houses and several nomad tents. It is the religious center of the Yellow River headwatersregion. An old monk leads visitors into the main building and tells his story. The Chinese imprisonedhim from 1961 to 1980, he says..Fourphotos of the Dalai Lama are displayed in the prayer room, one behind an empty bottle of Tuo liquor with artificial red flowers in it. The old man has even set up a symbolic chair for the Dalai Lama, which he has also decorated with a photo..Displaying photos of the Dalai Lama is strictly forbidden in the Tibet Autonomous Region. But, in neighboring Qinghai, the government rules with a somewhat looser grip, and pictures of the Tibetan monk -- berated by the Chinese government as a "divider" and "traitor" -- can still be displayed. The Dalai Lama, in exile in India since 1959, is also a son of the Yellow River. He was born almost 77 years ago, in the village of Taktser, in Qinghai.

.Shedding Light on Old Secrets

.Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province, is about 200 kilometersaway.Since the 1950s, the city has grown to become an important center for the oil and chemical industries, and it now has a population of 3.5 million. For a long time, environmental protection was not even a concepthere. The city's factories and all of its households simply dumped their sewage and wastewater into the Yellow River. Sewage-treatment plants are only now being built for residential areas..A cable car takes visitors across the river to the White Pagoda. For his conversation with SPIEGEL, the writer Yang Xianhui, 66, has chosen a nearby teahouse, and not just because of the nice view of the city and the oldest railwaybridge across the Yellow River, which German engineers built in the early part of the lastcentury. Yang also feels that he won't be bothered at the teahouse. He has made it his mission to shed light on China's dark past.

.Yang wants to document the atrocities of a part of Chinese history that the Communist Party would prefer to keep under wraps even today: Mao's "Great Leap Forward" at the end of the 1950s.At the time, China's leader tried to radically industrialize the country, aiming to catch upeconomically with the likes of Great Britain "within15 years." The Communist Party ordered farmers to build small blastfurnaces in their fields and make steel. At the same time, it required them to produce more and more grain for the cities. The Great Leap Forward ended in a catastrophe, with up to 45 millionChinese dying of starvation..Encouraged by Deng Xiaoping, who would later become an economic reformer, the party sent about half a millionalleged "right-wing deviants" to re-education camps. The camp inmates, often educated city dwellers, were accused of questioning the policies of the Communist Party. Many did not survive the ordeal..One of the camps was in the town of Jiabiangou in the Gobi Desert.Yang, the author, tracked downsurvivors of the camp and published their stories in a smallShanghai literary magazine, whose editors ignored the bans imposed by censors. On this morning, Yang has brought along Chen Zonghai, a spry, 79-year-old former teacher. Of the Jiabiangou labor camp's roughly 3,000 inmates, he was one of only a few to survive..Chen is bald and wears large glasses. It was his bad luck to have been "too quiet" in the self-criticism meetings that were customary at the time. The party used these meetings to examine the class consciousness of its subjects, and party officials accused Chen of not having denounced anyone. As a result, he was loaded onto a truck on the banks of the Yellow River and taken to Jiabiangou together with other "right-wing deviants.".The insidious thing about this form of detention was that it was not limited by time."We were expected to work hard, day and night, and to re-educate ourselves," Chen recalls. But the camps developed into death camps, as the already scant food rationsbecame smaller and smaller until there was no food at all. The guards looked on as the prisonersstarved to death, one after another..Chen pulls a blade of grass out of the ground."This is edible," he says. "I used to dream of sumptuous meals back then. It was the winter of 1959, and more and more of my fellow prisoners were dying." The horrific episodefinally ended in 1961, when the authorities released the few remaining survivors.

.From Death Camp to Blossoming Oasis

The old death camp is near Jiayuguan, an hour's flight from Lanzhou.In this world, the past and the future live side by sidenear the crumbling Great Wall, built to protect the Chinese from nomadic horsemen. The city is also home to China's nuclear engineers, who work at a laboratory in the desert about 100 kilometersaway. Every morning, at 7:40, a train takes engineers and workers to the secret nuclear center. At about6 p.m., it brings them back to Jiayuguan.

Somewhere along a road that leads from the city to one of China's four space stations is a bumpydirt road -- the path to the former Jiabiangou hunger camp..At first glance, there is nothing to remind the visitor of the horrors of the Great Leap Forward.Today, Jiabiangou is a blossoming oasis on which corn, melons and chili peppers are grown. A sign at the entrance warns: "He who does not work properly today can look for a new job tomorrow." Quotations from the speeches of party leaders Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao are written in chalk next to the sign.Not a single sign or even memorial stone offers a hint of what happened here.Medical students from Lanzhou collected all the corpses in 1960, and the skeletons were distributed to universities to be used as instructional material..Mr. Chen, who is not related to the former teacher, runs the government farm.He doesn't feel comfortable about having to open a dark chapter in China's history to foreign visitors. But since he holds Yang, the author, in high regard, he shows us the graves the prisoners dug and the trees they planted. "More than1,000people formed a chain here to transport stones," he says.

.Then Chen mentions the "necessary sacrifices" that a country like China has to make in order to enable progress.He also finds a comparison that helps him clear his conscience. The construction of the Great Wall also claimed many lives, he says, "but it united the country."In the teahouse in Lanzhou, the old teacher gazes across the Yellow River and a sea of buildings."I don't believe in anything anymore," he says. Although the tea garden is large and almost empty, threemen sit down at the next table and listen attentively. Author Yang speaksdemonstratively and with a loud voice as he tells the story of Jiabiangou. "These young Stasiguys should hear what happenedback then," he says, referring to the dreaded secret police of the former East Germany.

.An Underground Inferno

The Chinese have yet another name for the great river. They call it "China's Sorrow," because of all the tragedies that have unfolded on its banks. Another 600 kilometersdownstream from Lanzhou, China's troubled river seems to flow directly into hell.There, on the path to Wuda, in Inner Mongolia, the Yellow Riverwinds sluggishly past oases, through steppes and deserts and into a gray, moonlike landscape of dust and debris.There is not a blade of grass growing or an insect crawling here; even the birds have disappeared. The earth is boiling-hot beneath the surface -- so hot, in fact, that it can melt the soles of people's shoes if they stand still for too long. Sometimes the ground opens up and pulls people down into its fiery depths. .An environmental inferno covers an area of several square kilometers.Underground coal deposits have been burning here for more than 50 years. The fire ignited itself, and it keeps flaring up when oxygen enters abandoned mine shafts.It is difficult to breathe the highly polluted air, and the rain is acidic.Manymillions of tons of coal have already been burned at the site, where firefighters are slowly gaining control over the fire with the help of German experts. They are isolatingsources of the fire with underground walls and shifting large volumes of earth in an effort to deprive the flames of oxygen.

.

An Industrial Giant in a Desert

On the edge of the Wuda inferno, workers have just paved a new road with concrete, as if to prove that nature will not get the better of them.New coalmines have already sprung up on the other side of the road, only a few meters from the existing coal fires. "It isn't dangerous here anymore," says Chen Zengfu, manager of the Second Huaying coalmine. "We go down to depths of up to 700 meters (2,300 feet).".In the 1960s, Mao moved parts of his heavy and arms industry to this wasteland, hoping to protect it from a Soviet attack.The project was called "Third Line." Later on, farmers came to the area -- not always voluntarily -- to cultivate the desert along the Yellow River.The smoke from these fossils of industry darkens the sky, while heavy trucks wheeze along potholed roads.Prostitutes wait for truckdrivers in bleak, tile-covered buildings. The Zhurong steel mill smolders on the bank of the Yellow River. A few hundred meters down the road, on a square in a village called Red Star, Second Unit, residents are preserving cabbage for the winter. "We can't breathe," they say. "We allhave lung problems.".The mill pays the village80,000 yuan (about €10,000) a year as compensation for the poor airquality. The farmers use the money to buy water from the Yellow River to irrigate their fields..Modern industrial zones built in recent years, which are even more gigantic than those from the Mao era, line the horizon. Flights landing at the airport in the city of Wuhai pass over countless factories, smokestacks and cooling towers set against the backdrop of the Yellow River glittering in the afternoon sun..Six-, eight- and 10-lane roads cutthrough the sand dunes.This is where China casts the concrete for prefabricated buildings in Beijing and Shanghai, molds the plastic for radios and TV sets, and hardens the steel for skyscrapers, bridges, cars and high-speed trains..The city administration has just built a giant government building, twofuturistic-looking stadiums, a university and an opulent party academy.Now it wants to tear downsome recently finished apartment buildings because newer, more ambitious plans have replaced the older ones..On the highest peak of the nearbymountains, workers have begun chiseling a bust of the legendary Mongol ruler Genghis Khan into the rock, just as the Americans did with several of their presidents in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The great conqueror will gaze out across the Yellow River and into the vast regions beyond.

China's Dubai

Party officials in Wuhai are not alone.Their counterparts all along the Yellow River dream of elevating their cities into the ranks of important international metropolises.Hardly anyone has bigger plans than the party leaders in Ordos, about 80 kilometers south of the Yellow River in Inner Mongolia.Ordos is viewed as China's Dubai. Experts estimate that government-run and privately owned mines have generated more than $35 billion in revenues since 2010. At times, economic growth in the region has been twice as high as in the rest of the country..And this trend is expected to continue.Engineers have discovered one-sixth of China's coal reserves and a third of its natural gas reserves in Ordos. Each of the city's 1.5 million residents already generates about $20,000 a year in revenue, more than in any other part of China..The party has built a brand-new district near Ordos, complete with an army headquarters and a university for 8,000 students.The new district, called Kangbashi, is expected to house up to 300,000 people one day, although only a few thousand have moved there so far. Kangbashi is still a ghost town -- and a monument to megalomania on the steppes.

The Coal Barons

A few kilometers south of Kangbashi lies the main source of the region's wealth: coal.The area is dotted with blue-and-white shaft towers and silos. On video screens in a control tower, engineers monitor what happens underground in the state-of-the-art mine..A narrow inlet in the Yellow Riverseparates modern industrial China from its ugly underbelly. On the other side, private companies have dug tunnels into the ground. Fully loaded trucks struggle out of the gates of these unsafe miniaturemines. The trucks are so old and rundown that every tripunderground could be their last..The miners who work at this mine live on a hill above it, in huts with iron stoves in the middle.The stench of communal toiletshangs in the air. The workers payno rent, but there is only a small cafeteria for the entire settlement.The owners of mines like these are partly responsible for the construction boom in China's cities. Yellow River coal barons, for example, have bought up entire neighborhoods of new buildings in the capital, Beijing. They usually pay in cash and leave the apartments empty, betting thatprices will continue to rise...Barely Getting By

Traveling along the lower course of the Yellow River is like being tossed back and forth between the past and the future in a brokentime machine. Behind the dikes, there are villages that haven'tchanged in centuries and towns with Mao-era street names like "Iron and Steel." These places have no village squares, no bars and no cemeteries. The farmers bury the dead in their fields.

Ten yearsago, the river becamesilted up for almosttwo-thirds of the year east of the provincial capital Jinan, but now the water glistens in the sun once again.The government regulates how muchwater the individual provinces can extract from the river, and industrial companies are now required to build modern irrigation canals for the region's farmers so that less water evaporates.Three workers are shoveling awayin front of a pumping station. The farmers behind the dike need water from the Yellow River for their corn and cotton fields. They have set off a small fireworks displayin front of the dike to drive away the river's evil spirits.Nearby, migrant workers making little more than €10 a day are stacking stones with their bare hands to reinforce the dike in case the river floods. Stone blocks are neatly stackedeverywhere along the lower course of the Yellow River."The water is now drinkable," says Wei, a tofu vendor who drives his motorcycle through all of the riverside villagesevery morning.Fish are swimming in the river again, and the residents are killing and then collecting them by dipping electric cables in the water.It's market day in a village called "Forge Square," where vendors are selling fruit, vegetables, cheap electronics and clothing.Old Mao caps can be had for the equivalent of €0.57, while other vendors sell traditional enamel bowls with garish floral patterns. "We are doing neither well nor poorly," says one farmer. "We have a few thousand yuan left over at the end of the year."Duan, a 71-year-old knife-sharpener, sits by the side of the road in a blue jacket."I make 500 to 600 yuan (€62 to €74) a month," he says. He needs the money because he doesn't want to be a burden on his children. "We farmers receive no pension in China," he says.The party has lifted one major burden from the shoulders of Duan and his family: He no longer has to pay all of his medical billshimself. Like Duan, all700 million of China's rural residents are now able to purchase health insurance.Duan says that the insurance costshim the equivalent of €6 a year.In return, he gets40 to 70 percent of his medical bills paid, whether he is treated as an outpatient or in a hospital. "I've already had the photo taken for the certificate," he proudly says.

The River's End

One hundred kilometersfarther east, the Yellow River finally flows into the Bohai Sea, where a giant oil field was discovered about 50 yearsago.The field is called "Victory," and today it is dotted with the burning flares of refineries and oil pumps swingingup and down like pendulums.The government has established a nature reserve at the mouth of the Yellow River.There is also a futuristic-looking tourist center and pleasure boats offering tours into the bay, to the site where the brown water of the river meets the blue waters of the ocean. The skipper has to pay close attention to the depth sounder because, after running its course of more than5,000 kilometers, the river is now less than half a meterdeep.The boat, the Dragon's Gate 688, has now gotten stuck in the mud with day-trippers on board.Another boat cautiously approaches the vessel to stir up the silt so that the boat will have enoughwater underits keel again. The maneuver succeeds after aboutan hour, and both ships chug off into the blood-red evening sun..A little farther upstream, in the provincial capital Jinan, residents are flying kites between government buildings in the evening sky.Small light bulbs attached to the kites make themtwinkle like stars.

.Kites have been flown here for centuries.But today's China is no longer content with such traditional amusements.In one corner of the square, loudmusic is screeching from a boom box. A group of dancers put on shoes with metal attachments. Then the residents of this city by the Yellow River tap-dance to the strains of Irish folk music..

We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.